ROB WOUTAT | What makes a good president? Well ...

Having prevailed in Kitsap's GOP caucuses last week, and in the state generally, and after Super Tuesday this week, Mitt Romney is still in the lead to be his party's candidate for the presidential election this fall.

He certainly has imposing credentials: He graduated cum laude from his law school and was in the top 5 percent of his business school class. He's been successful in business at Bain Capital Management and ran for the U.S. Senate in 1994.

In 1999 he became the CEO of the organizing committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics, an event that made a profit of $100 million. He served as Governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007 before running for President in 2008.

Despite his successes in varied endeavors, it's not his experience as governor or his success with the 2002 Olympics that he's emphasizing in this campaign but his success in business.

So we should ask, Do businessmen make good presidents?

Our 44 presidents have come to the office via varied routes. Thirty-nine have had political experience at the national level as senators and/or representatives, or as state governors. Some have been cabinet members. More than half have been lawyers. Fifteen have been soldiers, three of them generals (Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower). A few have been academics, newspaper editors, and businessmen.

When historians rank American presidents from best to worst, certain names consistently appear in the top 10 (and in the bottom 10).

Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, with their wisdom, consistency of vision, and exemplary moral courage in holding the country together in its most trying times, consistently make the grade.

Theodore Roosevelt and Truman rank high, too, although it took time for us to recognize Truman's strength and achievements. Both were incorruptible leaders who were wise enough to know what was right for the country and courageous enough to take political risks to do it.

Jefferson usually ranks high, and so do Wilson (an academic and former governor), Eisenhower (a general and a university president), and Reagan (a movie actor, corporate spokesman, president of the Screen Actors Guild, and a former governor).

Unfortunately our interminable political campaigns don't tell us which candidates will make good presidents, only which are good campaigners, and campaigning calls for special requirements: More than anything else, lots and lots of money, either money of their own or the ability to raise it. Physical appearance. Glibness. The ability to unleash volumes of information rapidly in instant response to a question — whether the information is accurate or not. Physical stamina. An attractive spouse and family. The willingness to tolerate the sometimes-puerile questions in televised debates and to call your opponents names.

However well-supplied a candidate is with these qualities, they bear no correlation to the likeliness of his success in leading the country, which calls for very different attributes, ones that may not become evident until he's in office. Who would have expected so much of Lincoln at the start of his first term? Or of Truman when the presidency suddenly dropped on his head? Those least-prepared, least-pretentious, self-educated, plain-talking men with meager credentials had the self-confidence and moral strength to become great in response to crises.

Will a businessman be a good president? There is no reason to think so. We've had only three businessmen who later occupied the White House: Jimmy Carter, a businessman/farmer before he went into politics; George H.W. Bush, an oil man before going into government; and George W. Bush, an oil man and baseball team owner before becoming a politician. Of our 44 presidents, historians rank Carter and Bush I in the middle of the pack; Bush II, near the bottom.

Conservative columnist David Brooks argues that " great leaders tend to have an instrumental mentality. They do not feel the office is about them." Instead they see themselves as instruments of a cause larger them themselves, a cause that gives them a longer perspective and causes their administrations to move in one direction.

"In reality," Brooks says, "Romney's (business) success is largely irrelevant to the question of whether he could be a good president. The real question is whether he has picked up traits like emotional security, political judgment and an instrumental mindset from his upbringing and the deeper experiences of life."